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Quote of the day

Horace Deidu, “Were it not for the tenacious independence of Apple and the business model agility of IBM, neither company would be around today to leverage one another.”  (Asymco)

Chart of the day

Murdoch_0714

Investors can’t stop themselves from looking for signs of a market top.  (Phil Pearlman also Zero Hedge)

Markets

Like 2007 the stock market is showing signs of internal weakness.  (Pension Partners)

The stock market is experiencing some divergences.  (Humble Student)

Are investors being lulled into a sense of complacency by low interest rates?  (Sober Look)

Commodities

Commodity seasonality should only be one part of a trade equation.  (All Star Charts)

Grains are in a textbook downtrend.  (Attain Capital)

Commodity investors are once again earning the ‘roll yield.’  (WSJ)

Strategy

Backtests are fun but not necessarily very informative.  (A Wealth of Common Sense)

Bubbles are fun, until they are not.  (TraderFeed)

Why you can’t become Warren Buffett. An excerpt from Cullen Roche’s Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Money and Finance.  (Business Insider)

Companies

Apple ($AAPL) and IBM ($IBM) are forging closer ties around the iPad.  (WSJ, The Verge, Recode)

Yahoo ($YHOO) increasingly looks like a play on Alibaba.  (Pando Daily, Quartz, WSJ)

Rupert Murdoch wanted to merge 21st Century Fox ($FOXA) with Time Warner ($TWX).  (Dealbook, Quartz, Businessweek)

The US tobacco industry can’t get much more concentrated.  (Dealbook, FT)

Finance

The big banks are no longer the profit machines they were pre-crisis.  (The Upshot)

Walgreen ($WAG) is contemplating a tax inversion.  (WSJ)

Global

Is Spain’s stock market a false dawn?  (Market Anthropology)

Buffett’s favorite market indicator applied to Japan.  (Meb Faber)

Economy

New homebuilders are pretty optimistic.  (Calculated Risk)

Retail sales were weaker than expected.  (Bespoke)

Why secular stagnation is a myth.  (Wonkblog)

What if health care spending grows a lot slower than commonly thought?  (Business Insider also The Upshot)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

What you might have missed in our Tuesday linkfest.  (Abnormal Returns)

Mixed media

Techniques on how to cut the cable cord.  (WSJ)

Google ($GOOG) is now tracking gas leaks.  (Wonkblog)

Your friends look like you because there are genetic similarities.  (Washington Post)

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